…also relocating the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem? 8O

It’s just seeing this JC thread all the time here that really bores the life out of me!

And yet you keep clicking and commenting on it! What’s up, is the rest of the forum even more boring?

Pro tip: there is another page with more bike-related stuff and another one with stuff for sale on it too. and on the chat page, the ones about big diy projects are great fun.

Toddboy – Member

Whatever. Just getting bored with you two loving JC all the time.

It’s a 346 page thread and i have posted on it on about three days of the 18 months it has been running. Is that ‘all the time?” In fact you have about four fewer posts on this thread than I do. :P

[edit] dazh, THM insists that whatever it is that is happening, the NHS is not being privatised. Although perhaps he may be warming to his idea in his last post above. In a way i don’t disagree with him, its not as straightforward a change as it was when the railways or untilities were privatised, but then neither is the nature of the business. ‘Choice’ in the health service is still largely an illusion and also not one that currently ‘cost to the cosumer’ is a factor in, (as it might be for me in terms of which long-distance train service or energy supplier broker, but also we are not really consumers of healthcare in the way we are of train journeys, bus rides, gas/water/phone/electricity.
However in terms of health and indeed statutory social services, what we do need is a cross-party term for whatever is happening that factors in the profit and commercial interest into ‘doing things ‘for free’ to/for sometimes desperate and vulnerable people that would rather not need to use your service at all’.

or comment on them!

Bravo. 346 pages and that’s the first mention (I think) of Chomsky.

8)

My posting history over the last year would suggest I miss a great deal that goes on here these days, but I don’t hear Chomsky often if ever mentioned on stw. Funny considering the sorts of posters on here, and how often I hear of him elsewhere in internetland.

But then the reverse is true for red dwarf and Hg2g jokes though.

Having been involved in privatisations in the past, I know the real trick is normally to make it look good not awful. Are yo sure that you don’t mean asset stripping?

So we are privatising the NHS? I thought you said we weren’t?

I think the trick here is winning over the owners and recipients of the service, and then the voters. Chomsky put it the best, but of course you know that.

Actually its a brilliant ‘therapeutic bind.’ (google that, and look for the parallels to recruiting people to cults for that matter 8O )

“Your health service is doomed -a combination of bad fortune and reckless overuse by you and your fellow countrymen are responsible for it, sinner. Oh, and those nasty greedy GP’s with their 60 hour weeks. Slackers. But we are the ones that can save you, it will be hard but you just need to trust us.”

not a snidey or sarcastic post here, more of a gently pissed and fuzzily confused one. (‘on the waterfront’ is on bbc2, mmmmmmm…)

I accept that austerity wasn’t really all that. After all, even lefty blogs remind us of how under Osborne the debt went up etc etc, it must have gone somewhere..

How do we reconcile that with the bits that show unequivocally that the NHS was about the only part of public service in which he didn’t smake significant cuts? (and as above, it is in crisis anyway partly because of defunding in not-so-obviously-health areas). What did he spend it all on instead or where did he/we take less in tax?

‘Nationalise’ is a bit sensationalist, non? And not really what he said at all. But don’t let that get on the way of a good headline, eh?
Curious about your thoughts on the other bit I mentioned. Again, putting aside hw you administer it, it’s such an obvious one in terms of warming the cockles of the average tabloid reader that I am surprised the conservatives haven’t beaten him to it and suggested it already.

But I am biased, after three days of NHS care at home I’m afraid I had to bite the bullet and pay for it this week so I am thankfull for the choice. So my view is tainted by current experience.

Indeed. Under-resource, claim it’s broken and then offer choice of contracted out profit-making service (I know how much you hate the ‘p’ word) is the oldest trick in the book. Glad you’re staying objective about it.

“Substantive policies…. , again, remember the days when this stuff didn’t matter so much 19 months into a 60 month term of opposition?

But yes there is plenty more on record and with public and professional support from Jc about health besides ‘win the election’. Actually is that what you meant by “getting rid of the tories” or are you perhaps implying that the owners of failing residential and nursing homes and the staff of profit-making healthcare providers with contracts >250k and offshore tax arrangements are indeed ‘the tories’?)

Thm, it’s a novel way of generating ideas I’ll grant you, like a sort of comedy scattergun approach.

Only somehow some of these crazy ideas keep being popular with unexpectedly large numbers of not always very left wing people. What if that crazy “chuck an idea out there and see what the surveys of actual voters say” became the new focus group? Seems to have worked for brexit and the comedic and unelectable trump and yet JC is far less heavy on the “Mis-speaks”.

Thm you are excellent at arguing the policy not the man but the other thrust of this thread is “no policies and out of touch”. His responses to NHS crisis and this crazy salary cap idea seem to challenge this, twice in a week, who knew?!

And amazingly, despite the chaos that is brexit and the Conservative party at the moment, Labour seems to have the relative luxury (who would want to lead the U.K. right now?!) of an opposition PM who is not going anywhere so a couple of years left to turn them into a costed manifesto.

Remember when the opposition didn’t have to firm much quite so much of this up less than 2 years after losing a GE? Feels like those days were only 5 or 10 years ago… ;)

This all must be terribly perturbing.

Aaaah TJ. You are the man for economical drivetrain preservation aren’t you? :) I had a vision of a saucepan of gently melting putoline when I was making my chain & cassette analogy up there, ^^^

Damn straight, brother Todd!

What we need is someone popular with teh yoof and gets them to vote anything at all, with morals, ideas and dare I say it ‘policies’ supported by not just the traditional left, but also swing and even right wing voters and who can get over 50% when we gerrymander the bejeesus out of the next leadership coup.

IGMC

Jamba, that’s not my point. In a sense I agree with you and cfh, humans are far too self interested to let a rule like this get in the way.
Like you my first idea for circumventing this was to subcontract out the lower paid jobs rather than bumping up salaries with ‘allowances’ (sorry Flashy!).

The point you are both missing or perhaps avoiding is that there are arguments about workability and arguments about electability or popularity. Here is yet another example of an idea that chimes with public opinion (even conservative voters who are 47% in favour, 13% undecided and 40% against) and yet the echo chamber of this thread insists the Labour Party led by JC has no ideas and no policy.

It’s like moaning about having to spend £££ on a new chain and cassette because you skimped on bike maintenance and the cost of degreaser, oil etc.

The government made a rod for their backs de-funding other areas of the wider health and social care system. This was foolish in the extreme and done despite warnings over and over, this short-term (did they even expect to win in 2015?) strategy is costing financially as whatever way you spin it, increased hospital admissions and lengths of stay costs far more than what was saved elsewhere.

Any fool that works in our business knows the impact on the front and back end of local authority cuts on social care and funding for residential-nursing care. Quite simply, the more it becomes a ‘granny-farming on a budget’ society the more care homes either fail to keep people well enough to stay out of hospital or financially go under meaning fewer places an it’s harder to get ‘medically fit’ (to not be in an acute medical bed) people out of hospital. These are not just heads on beds either, my acute medical experience was that these poor souls, too poorly to go home proper but just waiting for a nursing home, were actually very ‘Labour intensive’ meaning impact on the safe staffing levels on the ward. Oddly a sub-hdu but still-very-I’ll 45-year old is often far less time consuming to care for safely than a medically stable but very elderly frail or stroke sufferer.

So Jamba is both incorrect in his numbers but slso missing the point that it is the last few years of central government cuts to LA funding (curiously worse for labour councils!) well outside the NHS that is equally to blame for this and of equal importance in coming months.

And yet however unworkable this insane idea is strangely popular. Even with conservative voters.
This wouldn’t be the first unworkable idea on either team to gain traction. We are reminded that we need policies and these policies need to be vote winners first and foremost. We know from many elections experience, and increasingly these days that workable policies don’t win elections on their own. Popular ones do though.

I am sure it’s a small thing now despite being a big thing crowed over and lambasted a few days ago in this thread, but somewhat awkwardly according to the Indy, even 47% of tories are supporting the ludicrous idea of capping maximum wages at 20x the least paid person in large companies with government contracts.

When will this madman come up with an idea that is popular with voters, eh?

As for strengthening the social/residential/nursing care sector instead of denying the crisis and then blaming GP’s, that sort of policy idea will never take off with doctors who have nothing to gain from it. Oh, except it is just what they are asking for too. Honestly, you couldn’t make it up…

I forget which teaching union did it but a couple of years ago there was an foi request that revealed that in primaries, after inspections, those who subsequently became academies were more likely to have a lower ofsted rating (than the one they had previously) on a subsequent inspection than those who stayed under local authority and were inspected again. So your headteacher can bask in the confidence that the best/only evidence we have is that his new academy is more likely to come off worse next time around.

Cut the ‘Around 1 in 10 hospital outpatient appointments are missed every year in England’ again NHS figures

10% improvement here

I don’t know about other people who run outpatient clinics, but in ours it’s considered rather bad form to just sit there for the duration of the missed appointment twiddling one’s thumbs. I use DNA’s (shorthand for missed appointments) to catch up on everything else e.g. reports, notes, referrals, phone calls to patients. This is all stuff that doing in that missed appointment slot creates time elsewhere to see more patients again. Yes it increases waiting list times for others by 10% and yes it is a bit more time consuming than having not seen them in the first place but that is not at all the same as it actually costing us that much more to run our service.
Also outpatients is just one part of it, ambulances, crisis, pharmacy, laboratory, emergency theatres and inpatients do not have appointments as such and increasingly are run over a safe %age of capacity (you keep your intensive care ward with a couple of empty beds and spare staff for the catastrophe you can’t predict the timing of but can plan for.

As above, scotland, wales, east anglia, Cornwall..

I live in a city of 260000 people next to a main line railway and the largest hospital west of Bristol but it takes 50 minutes at 70mph to drive to the nearest motorway. Add 20 more minutes to that if you live on the other side of town. If you lived in Penzance you’d be looking at just over 2 hours in clear traffic at 70 to get to one. That’s an expensive driving lesson!

But in the real world, ‘rural’ dual carriageways (eg A30 and cornwall-side A38) with poorer surfacing, mud, agricultural vehicles, cyclists, narrower lanes (I think!), no or minimal hard shoulders, shorter slip roads, and of course filter lanes for turning right, steeper gradients and tighter curves all at a frankly crazy 70mph (IMHO) are excellent training for how relatively easy and safe it is to drive on a motorway IME.

I know someone who learned to drive in Guernsey, she had never been on a dual carriageway or got over 30 (island-wide speed limit) and out of 4th. She did choose to get extra lessons when she came over here.

My renewal letter came a couple of days ago and said they can’t/won’t offer a renewal. I think it’s the car not me as wife and I have (so far!) impeccable histories as drivers and if they counted that far back we would have an 18 year no claims history. Car is t4 caravelle through normal car broker as opposed to van/commercial.

If we can just deal with the people complaining about other people having a discussion that they’re not actually taking part in themselves

Shame, as he seems to be one of the few ‘out’ christians on here I would have been really interested in his thoughts on how one reconciles TM’s policy/actions with the teachings and acts of Jesus.

I am quite comfortable having openly religious politicians and even an openly religious PM. That’s the world we live in and even though we have dwindling numbers of politically observant people as an electorate we still largely seem to tolerate and reinforce a constitution that is somehow tied up with the monarchy and the Church of England. So what should we expect?

As above though, May and indeed Cameron and Blair all left the (backslidden) evangelical in me feeling upset and disenfranchised that the faith I thought I knew was being used to somehow bolster, justify or back up some rather un-Christian policy and decisions.

Ironically if Jesus were around today, his actions and teachings as reported in the gospels would have him backing current version of Labour (yes even the very atheist Corbyn) not TM DC or TB.

After all, having evil gamekeepers and pigeon fanciers as scapegoats keeps the donations flowing doesn’t it?

TBF someone was doing a great and somewhat organised job at keeping the concern and scapegoating going locally, rspb or no rspb.

Our local nest was poisoned in 2000. Mum and 2 chicks fwiw. I would imagine it takes a great deal of skill and organisation, (far more than I posess) to poison a pigeon carcass and lower it on a string 50 feet down a sheer quarry face into the nest but nevertheless someone managed it. Same MO a few years later in near Buckfastleigh, and more recently on south devon coast. One was found with an air rifle pellet in its wing last year near us too. I am fairly confident it is not ‘laypeople’ with these skills, equipment and going to these lengths.
Whether there are enough of them now (and I see rspb now push the ‘length of time it takes to repopulate’ angle rather than the low numbers from a few years back) is largely irrelevant whilst it is still a criminal offence to kill them.
If it didn’t keep happening then the rspb etc might have to find something else to report and other sad stories to raise funds with.

Bubs, it seems you can’t often have a wildlifey/countrysidey thread on stw without bickering breaking out about this or that conservation/protection organisation (more frequently RSPCA as I recall, and never anything to do with me previously). I am cracking open a frosty one and leaving your lovely thread with my apologies for my part in derailing it.

“Vindictive brainwashing” from the RSPB:

As peregrine numbers have recovered, some pigeon fanciers and game interests have called for the removal of the legal protection given to peregrines. Maintenance of legal protection is required under European Birds Directive.

The RSPB believes that the highest level of protection is essential to the conservation of the peregrine, which remains comparatively rare, and is extremely vulnerable to human activities (including continued illegal persecution). Once the peregrine population declines, it takes many years to recover. The peregrine is a valuable indicator species of the health of the environment, but only if its numbers are not kept artificially low.

The peregrine is a widespread species, present at low densities. Because of this, targeted conservation action can be difficult. Broad scale habitat protection and reduction of pollution and chemical contaminants will benefit peregrines.

The RSPB and other organisations have been providing nesting ledges and boxes to help peregrines re-colonise their former ranges in the south and east of England. Continuing vigilance is needed to keep in check the illegal killing of peregrines by gamekeepers and pigeon fanciers, and the robbing of nests for eggs and chicks by egg collectors and falconers. The peregrine is included on the Green List of UK birds of conservation concern.

Yay!
As above, suprisingly adaptable and unflappable birds (did you see what I did there? ;) )

Back along our local nimbys tried to use them as an excuse not to build a blue trail for teh noobz -they didn’t take kindly to pointing out that the peregrines were not put off by mechanised tree harvesters laying waste to many hectares of larch 50m away from nest the season before, or that this pair had nearby ‘neighbours’ nesting in a church tower in central Exeter.

Our local ones have been victim to attacks by what we suspect are either gamekeepers (much private shooting land nearby too) or pigeon-fanciers. OP, do tell RSPB about this and see if someone can work out where they nest before the peregrine-haterz, breeders or egg-collectors do! -it might be worth thinking very soon about cctv for the nest more for security than birdwatching purposes.

Cougar: If that’s the case it’s like he is getting someone to ghost-write a whole new set of interests and indeed a whole new posting/writing style. Previous Freds were apparent from the first couple of threads by their way with words and ‘style’- as were subsequent incarnations of GW, glupton and labrat for that matter. I am sure you have some IT skillz and IP address stuff to back up your suspicions, but for me the difference between old Freds and this one is quite remarkable.

I’ve just made a brew -anyone for a hobnob? :D :D :D

Edlong: debate in this area is interesting on stw because we are a demographic with an above average proportion of members educated by the independent sector and/or sending their children to independent schools.

I’d suggest we disclose this when we discuss it. Me and kids: state schools but this is very much the exception in my wider family.

Clodhopper, to elucidate on ‘Fred’
– sorry my bikesnob.nyc idea was a bit of a diversion/red herring (he uses the word Fred’s to describe ‘entryists’ to road cycling with more money than ‘grit’ much like people in the U.K. derided for getting all competitive at sportives)

-when thm addresses you as Fred it is with reference to a former stw-er who has been banned many times and popped up again under various logins, and so it has become a bit of a sport on here spotting him, often with people simply addressing the suspect poster as Fred as freddibnah was one of his old old logins (which I think even predates thm’s time here) He was controversial and argumentative in style often more for his own (and others’!) amusement and also mostly lefty in his views- in many way the opposite of ninfan who is also on his umpteenth )voluntary not banned) login and argues a point for fun but manages not to bother the moderators at all with this) I am sure I remember ‘Fred’ (well it would have been a different login by then) giving thm a hard time and perhaps that’s why he in particular has addressed you in this way.
-so assuming it’s not you as I am sure it isn’t, take the ‘fred’ as an observation that your arguing style is creating a disturbance in The Force. :D

Klunk, any fool knows that (alongside sufferers of severe and enduring mental illness, and those with moderate to severe learning difficulties,) the very infirm elderly and people with Alzheimer’s don’t vote in the numbers that more physically and mentally well elderly people do. So looking after these people properly doesn’t really help you win elections.

Being lobbied by care contractors might though. :(

DrJ – Member

Very simple Fred

Playing the ball or the man ?

You’ll get nowhere on this forum softening your words with sports-themed analogies ;)

fwiw i find clodhopper’s arguing style vastly different from freddibnah/rudeboy. (*waves :D )
Unless its ‘fred’ used in the parlance of bikesnob.nyc?

You make it sound like he is still going on about it now. Nuts the idea may well have been, but:

He publicly apologised for it 8 months ago.

Onwards to hiding behind a glass door victory comrades!

Only difference I see between him and the present/last leader of the blue team is that he doesn’t have a brace of suited heavies with earpieces to get rid of the journalist and a blacked-out Rangie at hand to escape in.
These days you can’t expect much when you ambushput any politician on the spot, I wouldn’t expect any different from May, nether would I judge her for refusing to comment and not launching into some carefully scripted response as she would if interviewed on telly.

I will soon (still!) be an eu citizen married to a non-eu british citizen.
Perhaps it will be easier for both of us if we just bog off to Canada. ;)

What a fun story to come home from work to.

THM is this your day job? :D :D :D

New European Editorial today.

(My bold)

And in case anyone forgets, and begins to froth and foam about betrayals of democracy and treachery, it was the Great British public that put this system in place, over the course of centuries.

I had this a few years ago: so much adjustability in that you get in and outboard pad adjustment, spring tension of a kind, and then cable pull ratio at the rather lovely lever. Happy days!

15 without googling.
English
Welsh
French
Dutch
German
Swedish
Danish
Polish
Russian
Italian
Spanish
Portuguese
Gujarati
Farsi
Japanese
Irritated to realise I have forgotten a few more I learnt back along.

not a teacher but a children & family mental health nurse/practitioner- perhaps it is because I work with vulnerability, difference and so on but I am frequently asked by the more academic kids about my political views! I think this is about being extra-sure of not being judged perhaps? Obvs it shouldn’t matter but if you are gay, African, Eastern European, trans, auty, unemployed etc maybe your understanding of what you read and hear from the media might make you more anxious about having a ukip supporter as your mh worker.

Standard response from me that 1) it shouldn’t and doesn’t matter, and 2) to direct them to the political compass website to plot themselves and their parents and then try and imagine the answers that someone who chooses to do my job might give.

Jamba, try commenting on the actual story too eh?
Not a social worker (health, me) but frequently involved on a professional level with use of children’s acts and child protection, case conferences, fostering etc etc.
Professionally speaking I think this idea is terrible. Any ‘red tape’ cut leaves the door open for conflicts of interest, poor quality checks and balances and even greater level of resource-led decision making about the most vulnerable children than we already have from a conservative government who knows damn well that reductions on local authority funding and third sector/sure start funding has made a bad situation worse already. So far the contracting out of child health and probation services has been remarkably unsuccessful, why should introducing profit into this sector be any different? Poor value for money to the taxpayer and no ‘right to choose’ not to have a crap g4s type ‘service’ (like you at least theoretically have with academies or non-emergency health) for the users of these services or those that the services are forced upon (section 47 etc… or whatever section 47 will be called when the Conservative party have finished with it!)
You don’t need to read the canary to work that lot out.

Generous but not too generous then? Other leading and more eu countries seem quite relaxed (copyright Carney ;) ) about paying British students’ fees in their universities, never mind their own students.